Adapting vernacular strategies for the design of an energy efficient residential building in a hot and arid climate: City of Yazd, Iran

Today, buildings consume a significant amount of primary energy, and consequently they are a major source for greenhouse gas emissions resulting in global warming. During the last decades, the concept of sustainable architecture with the major aim of diminishing negative environmental impact of the building has brought significant demands and changes to the profession of architecture. In this way, decreasing the dependency of buildings on fossil fuels and their high rate of energy consumption in underdeveloped countries like Iran is receiving more attention by architects and governments. Iran is a country with a powerful history in using vernacular solutions to maintain an acceptable indoor environment, such as harnessing natural ventilation, using local and high thermal mass materials, optimizing building orientation. Despite this successful history, temporary Iranian architecture suffers from high consumption and inefficient building construction. The research presented in this thesis is initially concerned with investigating the traditional and vernacular features of Iranian architecture found in a hot–dry region. These features were considered in two shapes; energy efficiency features and social-cultural features. Moreover, the concept of Net Zero Energy Building with the significant aim of constructing sustainable has been assessed. As the result, by presenting a comprehensive study for features of Iranian vernacular architecture and Net ZEB concept, they have been combined to locate a high energy-efficient building in the city of Yazd with a hot and arid climate at the central area of Iran. Lessons derived from vernacular architecture caused considerable improvement in energy consumption of the proposed building, especially in heating, cooling, and lighting demands

Developing a Workflow to Integrate Tree Inventory Data into Urban Energy Models

Building energy simulation is of considerable interest and benefit for architects, engineers, and urban planners. Only recently has it become possible to develop integrated energy models for clusters of buildings in urban areas. Simulating energy consumption of the built environment on a relatively large scale (e.g., such as a neighborhood) will be necessary to obtain more reliable results, since building energy parameters are influenced by characteristics of the nearby environment. Therefore, the construction of a 3-D model of urban built areas with detail of the near-building environment should enhance simulation approaches and provide more accurate results. This paper describes the process of integrating urban forest inventory data into a 3-D energy model for a US Midwest neighborhood, including building footprint, parcel and tree data. This model was prepared for use in the Urban Modeling Interface (umi) tool to analyze the effect of tree shading on building energy performance. We used Grasshopper 3-D, the Meerkat plug-in, and GIS to integrate these datasets for model generation

Sustainability Target Pyramid A Synthesis of Sustainability and Information System

Abstract The businesses have a critical role in moving the society toward sustainability. The fast changing and dynamic global business environment requires firms to be more flexible to quickly adapt and respond to market changes. Among the forces that drive changes, requirements for corporate responsibility and sustainability are getting more urgent. During such difficult time as this economic downturn, companies are faced with hard choices to survive. Research has acknowledged that addressing sustainability issues is critical to the long-term existence and thriving of companies. The concept of sustainability makes it necessary that besides the economic categories and the operational environment protection, it should be considered the social effects of company in management actions. Sustainability business oriented can be realized through developing a corporate target pyramid in enterprise. Such pyramid will help organizations to shape their targets in accepting social, environmental and economic responsibilities. The current research tries to review the research background done till now and depict a perspective of an integrated target pyramid for both scholars and managers. Furthermore, this paper has a holistic look toward the concept of sustainable information system

A Young Man with Myocardial Infarction due to Trenbolone Acetate; a Case Report

Over the four decades, a significant decrease has been observed in age-related mortality caused by cardiovascular disease. People in developing countries suffer from CAD at a relatively younger age and about half of MI occurs under the age of fifty years. Abuse of anabolic steroids is one of the less common causes of atherosclerosis. In this report, a 23-year-old body builder male referred to emergency department (ED) with myocardial infarction (MI) following chronic Trenbolone acetate consumption. It seems that a comprehensive history of steroid consumption in young patients referred to ED with the chief complaint of chest pain or its equivalents is necessary in adjunct to other cardiac risk factors

Development of a Modelling Framework for Refined Residential Occupancy Schedules

Occupancy schedules are a leading source of uncertainty in building energy simulations. This uncertainty often results in an undesired gap between actual performance and predictions. Past efforts to develop more proper occupancy behavioural models have often been either oversimplified and hence underestimating or more precise but simply too complicated to become common practice. This study is an effort to find a balance between complexity and accuracy among the aforementioned models for the sole purpose of energy use studies in the context of residential neighbourhoods. We start with a probabilistic occupancy model based on the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and use input from the population of study to develop representative occupancy schedules